tkgally

61 ms·

1. 811.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   In Japan, as elsewhere, bookstores in general are facing hard times [1, in Japanese], but the Kanda-Jimbochō area in central Tokyo has somehow managed to keep over a hundred shops in business. Most of the area was aggressively redeveloped w
2. 812.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   I agree with everything you say, though I wonder a bit about this: > the Dead is more or less 'boomer music' these days. I haven’t lived in the U.S. for many years so I don’t know the current scene first-hand, but whenever I wa
3. 813.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   I’ve been using Japanese on computers on a daily basis since the mid-1990s. Mojibaké used to be a regular headache, but fortunately I rarely encounter it now. Most of the mojibaké I do see appears when staff at the Japanese university where
4. 814.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   Thanks for the questions! I bought the ninth edition so I could have copy in my own bedroom; I was possessive about books as a child. I bought the thirteenth edition after reading an article in the New Yorker magazine about the eleventh.
5. 815.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   When I was a child in Southern California in the 1960s, we had a set of the 1910/1911 eleventh edition of the Britannica in our home. At around fourteen, I bought my own set of the 1875 ninth edition for ten dollars at a church rummage
6. 816.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   Yes, yes. Though the site is still http, not https. I need to get on that one of these days.
7. 817.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   It looks great! I started my personal static website more than twenty years ago, and I have maintained it ever since with only a text editor and FTP software. When I began, I learned what I needed from books (!). If I were starting now, you
8. 818.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   I subscribed to YouTube Premium a year or so ago after somebody mentioned it here on HN. It was worth it; YouTube is a much more pleasant experience without ads. I was already paying for YouTube Music, which I’m not as satisfied with but ha
9. 819.▲
   by tkgally 4y ago

   I am sixty-five, and I will be retiring soon as a professor at a university in Japan. This has been my second career; previously, I had been a freelancer for twenty years. In the past twelve years or so, I have supervised about fifteen mast
10. 820.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    This was written in 2010. Has the situation—hype?—around nanotechnology changed since then?
11. 821.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    I’m color-blind, too. I can see only the resizing difference in the gif; the colors look identical to me. I haven’t ever experienced the reperception-by-suggestion phenomenon that you describe. But I do think that, when I was young, I gradu
12. 822.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    The full UN report is here: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie... The Chinese government’s response is here: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files&
13. 823.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Radio play-by-play of baseball games. I’m not really a baseball fan and I don’t care who wins or loses the games. But the calling of the pitches and the banter between the announcers provide something for my mind to latch onto so that I don
14. 824.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    I teach at a public university in Tokyo. “SDGs” is clearly a current buzzword being promoted by government policy in Japan. I subscribe to the paper edition of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and nearly every day there are multiple advertisemen
15. 825.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Possibly in the future, but not yet. I just tried several DALL-E prompts with “in the style of [my daughter’s name],” but the results looked nothing like her work. Maybe OpenAI hasn’t crawled her website [1] yet. Also, her commercial work u
16. 826.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    > I'm having a hard time seeing how increasingly better and freely available AI artwork doesn't just completely replace artists I agree that AI engines like DALL-E seem like a threat to many commercial artists, especially those
17. 827.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Thanks for posting that Twitter link. I use the Internet Archive frequently, and after not being able to reach it for a while I started to panic....
18. 828.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago [1], I tested DALL-E with prompts for paintings and drawings in three standard genres: still life, landscape, and portrait. The prompts for portraits yielded a lot of grotesquely unacceptable faces,
19. 829.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Thanks for the rant! A bit longer than is normal for HN, but I enjoyed it and learned things from it.
20. 830.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Former professional translator here (Japanese-to-English, 1986 to 2005). I have very mixed feelings about MT. On the one hand, as you and others point out, rates for human translation have been hurt, and the quality of a lot of MT-enabled t
21. 831.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    The intricate mechanism for playful purposes reminds me of Japanese karakuri dolls [1]. Some videos are at [2, 3, 4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_puppet [2] https://www.youtube.com/watc
22. 832.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    > DALL·E 2 struggles to generate realistic faces. According to some sources, this may have been a deliberate attempt to avoid generating deepfakes. That might be true, but after experimenting with DALL·E 2 last week (and spending more th
23. 833.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    > I imagine there must now be toys like the Speak & Spell to accelerate children's basic reading skills. Have you seen any? My daughter is trying limit my grandson’s exposure to electronic devices, including tablets and smartpho
24. 834.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    In another top-level response, Cyberdog asks, “Why is an article like this on the front page of HN?” That’s a very reasonable question. But now that the article is there, let me make a few comments about dakuten, handakuten, and hiragana in
25. 835.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Thanks for that. In case anyone is interested, the original Spectator is still worth dipping into. Many editions are available at the Internet Archive. For example: https://archive.org/details/cu31924013337203/pa
26. 836.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    > [H]aving a paranoid but blame-free culture is critical for security. The three employees who fell for the phishing scam were not reprimanded. We’re all human and we make mistakes. It’s critically important that when we do, we report th
27. 837.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    > Deglobalization That’s what I was going to say. Some people have been talking about it [1, 2], but it’s not yet getting the attention it deserves. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220702164210/https:/&#x
28. 838.▲
    DALL·E 2 variations on three common art themes(gally.net)

    2 points by tkgally 4y ago|1 comments
29. 839.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    DALL·E 2 can produce convincing versions of artworks on common themes. The above page links to about two hundred images for each of the following prompts or variations thereof: A painting of a pear, a bottle, and a flower on a table at dusk
30. 840.▲
    by tkgally 4y ago

    Many years ago, I attended a university with a library reading room like those shown in the linked article. The high, arched ceilings made a huge difference. You could hear the sounds of people talking, coughing, rustling paper, etc. from t